


Proclus

by Haecceity



Category: Alliance-Union - C. J. Cherryh, Inception (2010)
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Alternate Universe - Book/Movie Fusion, Consent Issues, Crime, F/M, Gehenna, M/M, PTSD, azi, calibans, no one can be trusted to tell their own story much less that of the person standing next to them, schizoid thought and behavior patterns
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-30
Updated: 2013-07-05
Packaged: 2017-12-09 23:21:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/779132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haecceity/pseuds/Haecceity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inception characters in the universe of CJ Cherryh's Alliance-Union series. This fic is intended for an audience that isn't acquainted with CJ Cherryh's books</p>
<p>I'm deliberately mushy on the Alliance-Union lore because what I want to do is impossible by a factor of about 60 years. In case someone else who's read the books reads this, it takes place a vague number of decades after Regenesis and before the Mri Wars.</p>
<p>First chapter revised for Alliance-Union canon errors.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Nolan or Cherryh and do not own any part of Inception or Alliance-Union</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Eames missed the sun. Not Sol herself of course. He missed rays of solar radiation filtered through layers of atmosphere. He missed the sun that would pour over the Earth, heating the muggy Mombasa days or even the thin light that lit some English autumns. To a lesser degree he missed Earth gravity. Adjusting to the slightly lighter gravity of Pell had started off with some minor bruising and escalated briefly to major bruising before he got the hang of it.

Six months aboard a merchanter ship had taught him that he hadn’t outgrown his childhood claustrophobia as thoroughly as he had thought. (Six months for his parents back on Earth, only a few waking days for Eames.) Following that, Eames had spent three months going through Alliance Security’s idea of basic training. He hadn’t bothered telling them much about his experiences on Earth. Not only was Pell still holding a grudge over Earth Company’s attempt to turn them over to Union but they also insisted on considering their Security training superior to anything he could have achieved on Earth. Eames was content to let that slide because most of his operations had been in-house corporate espionage and not something he wanted to go blabbing about to begin with.

Still, it had galled Eames’s sense of professional pride to be grubbing in the dirt next to raw recruits experiencing a natural gravity well for the first time. The domes weren’t bad. They had a gas mix a little higher in oxygen than Eames was used to and the UV lights were harsher than the natural slide toward dawn or dusk on Earth but since none of the other recruits were complaining, Eames supposed it was similar to conditions aboard the ships and stations. 

The thing that got under his skin, that he couldn’t ever fully tune out was the rain. When he’d first stepped off the shuttle, he’d been grateful to have a horizon again. It had taken a couple days for it to sink in that the grey clouds, grey rocks, grey mud, grey scrub, and grey rain weren’t going away anytime soon. He had moved to Mombasa to get away from this kind of weather. At this rate, he’d happily get back on a merchanter just to get away from the damp. As it was, he was required to shuttle back up to Pell’s Station and report for his assignment.

In his mind he practiced the important words. _Downbelow Station_ not Pell’s Station. _Downbelow_ not Pell. _Downers_ not Hisa. The details that he’d need to mimic stationer dialect. Three months of listening to stationers grumble and talk about home had been extremely helpful in that regard. All Eames had needed to do was sit and listen. So long as he stayed out of the way, they left him alone. No one wanted to talk to a man from Earth except to spit on Eames’s heritage. He had enough experience to know not to argue even if he’d been inclined to defend Earth Company in the first place.

Eames did nothing to fight the way he could see his instructors and the other recruits underestimate him. A man from Earth only came to Pell because he was either too incompetent to be accepted on Earth or too crazy to fit into the life of Sol. The instructors had watched to see which he was and Eames had chosen to present the sanest parts of himself. He’d discover what they’d made of him when he reached his new billet.

***

Arthur’s uniform was pressed, cleaned, and as neat as humanly possible. His dark eyes scanned the dock for the newest addition to the crew of the _Proclus_. She was an armed superfreighter escorting merchanters to Union. There was no real doubt that the merchanters would make it to Cyteen but there was some lingering doubt that Cyteen would let them leave. The Company Wars had cooled but were not forgotten by anyone except Sol, who consoled herself with fantasies of her relevance to humanity’s future.

Arthur had been a spacer too long to be able to guess the age of the man he recognized as new. Repeated journeying at higher than cee and the time he spent on jump drugs had left a very wide gap between the time Arthur had experienced and the time since he’d been born. Ensign Eames’s hair looked like a natural shade of brown so either he’d managed a good dye job on Downbelow or he was too young or too poor to be using rejuv treatments. He was still noticeably older than the average recruit. From the dossier, Arthur would guess that Eames’s family was wealthy enough to pay the exorbitant price of rejuv after it had been shipped from Union to Earth (roughly two years of travel depending on the engine the merchanter was using, Arthur’s mind calculated.) Once rejuv treatments were begun they needed to be continued or the person undergoing treatment would suffer a complete immune system failure. With that kind of incentive to keep buying, most from Earth didn’t start rejuv until they couldn’t put it off.

Arthur planned to be indispensable to Alliance Security by the time he needed rejuv. Alliance had several knockoffs floating around its web of commerce but in Arthur’s opinion, only a fool would trust his health to those. The drugs from Union were expensive and any day the war might go hot again but Arthur wasn’t going to bet his life that an Alliance chemist might have duplicated what Union had discovered on Cyteen.

“Chief Mate Arthur Davison,” he stuck out his hand and allowed Eames to introduce himself.

“I go by Eames,” Eames gave Arthur a charming smile as they shook hands.

“We’d prefer to keep your introduction informal,” Arthur said calmly. “Want to go for a drink? I’ll buy. We ship out day after tomorrow.” He watched a brief calculation cross behind the other man’s eyes before Eames nodded. Arthur led the way deeper into the station, demonstrating the keycard and explaining the blocks the station was split into. He paused by a section of hallway to point out where it would seal in case of a loss in pressure. He also showed Eames how to find the service corridors and where the breath masks were located. “Those corridors and quarters are for the Downers. Separate atmospheres and entirely sealed off from one another.” He paused to take in his audience’s reaction. “We’re not even supposed to think about going in there.”

“Visual learner,” Eames said with a smile that didn’t quite touch the distraction in his eyes.

“On board the ship if you break hull integrity, you might get sucked through whatever opening you made. At best you’ll need to make a run for the masks. You forget where the masks are, you die. You forget how to put the mask on, you die. You get stuck on the wrong side of a seal, we might be able to get to you in time. In emergency conditions we might lose gravity. You get disoriented, no one’s bringing a mask to you.” Arthur lectured.

Eames held up his hands in surrender.

“Dying bodies void themselves. Cleaning up after that’s gone through zero gee isn’t fun.” Arthur continued.

Eames frowned angrily, then grunted. “You’ve seen combat.”

Arthur shrugged irritably. “Most of the people we get who grew up in atmosphere, have some trouble adapting to the idea of needing to worry about air in the middle of a panic.”

“You mean from Earth,” Eames said accusingly.

“Earth, yes. A few from Cyteen make it this way. And now we have Gehenna.” Arthur said for the sake of specificity and started walking again. He led the way to a cheap spacer bar while Eames stopped bothering to hide the way he was scoping the corridors. “Here we are,” he announced before entering.

Eames scanned the room, taking in the spacers and stationers. Each table had several spacers who bore a strong family resemblance to the other members of their group. There were some groups that were all men but every woman was accompanied by at least two family members. Stationers, standing out because the dressed less practically, approached the groups from time to time. He gestured at Arthur’s uniform. “We don’t look dressed for this place.”

“I thought you might want to contribute to the gene pool before you ship out to an uncertain fate,” Arthur said dryly as he guided Eames to a booth in the back. “Besides, every so often someone needs to be reminded that up for a good time isn’t the same as up for grabs. The uniform helps that message hit home.”

“Contribute... You’re having me on,” Eames said incredulously. Arthur judged him to be torn between some sort of outrage and frustration. Possibly Eames was beginning to hate him. Arthur could live with that. Most of the crew hated him at some point. It made it easier to keep them following Captain Cobb. More efficient to be respected than liked.“What, have you?” Eames asked.

Arthur gave another shrug and didn’t confide his suspicions about a three year old passenger aboard one of the ships they’d be escorting. “The women who come here want to have kids. They live with their uncles, cousins, brothers, you get the picture. The women want sperm, the men want sex... It’s a mutually satisfactory arrangement.”

“Except when the men get grabby,” Eames grumbled.

“Every gain has a risk associated,” Arthur said, watching the crowd without staring. “You’re about to spend several months in close quarters with a little over seven hundred people. What possessed you to volunteer for that?”

“I was always curious and then I was between jobs and I had the money for fare. And so I decided, why not?” Eames shifted to get a better view of the door.

“How... spontaneous,” Arthur said with some distaste. “How do we know you aren’t going to decide to go back?”

“Because I imagine that by now, there’s a warrant out for my arrest. Not that the news would have traveled here yet.” Eames gave Arthur another meaningless smile.

“And by the time we receive word, you’ll be en route to Cyteen. If it’s blown over by the time you get back? Will you decide you’ve had your adventure and it’s time to go back to the cradle of humanity?” Arthur raised his eyebrows.

“I suppose that depends on how the tour goes,” Eames said.

***

Captain Cobb surveyed the cramped bridge. The instrument panels filling the space tightly. At least the chairs were comfortable, designed to be sat in for hours at a time. He half listened as his crew conducted the roll call, merchanter ships reporting green lights on their engines and reconfirming jump coordinates. To Cobb’s right Chief Mate Davison was slowly filling out forms. Cobb was tempted to ask about the full manifest but decided plausible deniability still had its benefits.

He and Arthur cleared the bridge, leaving it to the helmsman. “You explained to the new crew members about the drugs?”

”He said he understood.” Arthur said. “He survived the trip here without any pneumonia so we’re putting him on tape.”

”And he gets checked out by Medical as soon as he we come back to normal.” Cobb ordered. He headed to his room and strapped himself into his bed. Helm pinged the intercom system and Cobb injected the jump drug into his bloodstream. He counted three heartbeats before he slid into a world of tape.

***

They came out four days away from Gehenna Station and reset the clocks. Eames looked at a holographic representation of the planet and smiled. Unlike the grey mass of swirling clouds that hid Pell from satellites, Gehenna had almost perfectly Earthlike weather patterns. Her oceans were a similar shade of blue and her landmasses tended toward similar shades of green and brown. Too bad that landing on the planet was strictly for Alliance and Union academics or those who had been born on Gehenna’s surface.

Eames was amused. On Earth, for millennia humanity had described space with words like heavenly and celestial. Men had seen heroes in the stars, pictured lands of gods. Once humanity reached the heavens, they started naming it hell.

The station perpetually falling around this hell was a relatively small one. The Alliance had once thought to use the planet for farms. Union had foiled that plan by sending a colonization effort designed to fail. When the Alliance had finally found its way to Gehenna, the place was filled with the children and grandchildren of Union colonists. And yet reports said the people of Gehenna certainly weren’t of Union. Or so said the documentary Eames had watched once when he was too jetlagged to sleep.

“They’ve begun sending out observers,” Arthur said from the doorway, watching Eames. “We’re picking one up.”

Eames bristled at the other man’s presence. “Come to keep an eye on me?” He’d been feeling annoyed since his trip to Medical had included his third full physical since he’d left Earth.

“No,” Arthur said irritably. “I thought you might want to see.”

“Warn him about the cheat?” Eames challenged, still doing extra rounds of KP for “his” part in a crew deck brawl. Assigned by the Chief Mate no less.

Arthur rolled his eyes and deliberately relaxed his shoulders. “I have an opportunity for you.”

Eames scowled at his hands for a moment before allowing his curiosity to overwhelm his better sense.

***

Cobb looked dubiously up at the reptilian eye and its vertically slit pupil. “The lot of you will be berthed in Cargo Bay B.”

“He can’t hear you,” Ariadne said quickly, “not like that.” She flipped her braids over her shoulder, noting the wondrously tightly woven fabrics her new traveling companions were wearing. So many star-men in one place was exciting enough to take her breath away.

“Then how do we-” Cobb squinted at the nine meter long lizard.

“I’m Bishop’s interpreter,” Ariadne said with pride as the attendant ariels scampered around her feet. The meter long lizards were a beautiful shade of iridescent green from their delicate, narrow heads to the tips of their long, whippy tails. They were lovely animals but not very bright, mimics rather than innovators.

“Are they- ah- housetrained?” Cobb asked in a strained voice.

“Housetrained,” Ariadne repeated the unfamiliar word as she shifted the weight of her leather pack.

A slim, dark haired man in nearly identical star-man costume appeared at Cobb’s elbow. “Will there be a problem with them defecating where they shouldn’t?” he asked smoothly.

“No,” Ariadne shook her head. “They learn terrain very quickly. I tell them where to do their business and they take instruction.” One of the ariels plucked a pebble from the pile Ariadne had left at her feet in case she needed to talk to Bishop. She nearly called after it but it simply stopped at a shorter man with broader shoulders and placed the pebble at his feet. “She says hello,” Ariadne translated.

“Do I hand the rock back?” the man asked, eyeing the ariel dubiously.

“It’s a gift,” Ariadne told him. “You can hand it back to me if you like.”

“Eames,” the man introduced himself as he gave her the pebble.

“Ariadne of Cloud River, daughter of Paeia the Elder,” Ariadne told him. He was holding out his hand so she took it star-man style. “And this is my brown, Bishop.” She couldn’t hold back the note of pride she took in being Bishop’s rider.

“Under Alliance law, they’re human,” the dark haired man said to Eames. “I’m Arthur. Pleasure to meet you.” He smiled, showing dimples before turning to speak to his leader. “Eames and I were on our way to double check something with the _Loaded Six_.”

“Don’t make me come looking for you,” Cobb said, still watching Bishop.

***

A representative of the Takahashi family was waiting for Arthur outside the docking clamp the _Loaded Six_ was using. The boy looked young and probably was relatively inexperienced at this sort of dealing. Going through younger members without any kind of criminal record was one way the Takahashi had avoided stricter punishment. Arthur was a known quantity to them. He didn’t ask for the kid’s name and he didn’t ask after Maaya. “The last time we talked, your family expressed an interest in painting. Eames here had a reputation as a painter on Earth.”

Eames had a good poker face. He didn’t even blink as Arthur put him on the spot. “It got me into trouble from time to time.”

The kid nodded slowly and spoke rapidly in a com device. “You would be compensated for your time and risk.”

Eames’s eyes flicked to Arthur. “Does he get a cut?”

“No,” Arthur said quietly. “I witness the deal and corroborate if there’s a disagreement.”

“And if I turn you in?” Eames asked pointedly.

Arthur shook his head at the kid. “Then you’d be the snitch from Earth.” Arthur wasn’t positive but he thought he heard something like humor in Eames’s snort.

“I thought it would take me a little while to find the blackmarket.” Eames said. “The blackmarket found me.”

“You have useful skills. It would be a shame to let them atrophy.” Arthur said mildly.

“I’ll take requests,” Eames told the kid.

***

Ariadne sat in the cargo bay, playing a game of put-and-take with one of the ariels. She leaned her back against Bishop while he napped. The vibrations of his breathing told her the size of the space without her needing to look up. The star-men’s boots announced their presence better than the scent of their soap in the overly sterile place. Tomorrow she would begin following her mother’s advice. “Always look where they say not to.” “Don’t let the star-men tell you what’s worth observing.” She was her mother’s eyes and ears in this strange place.

Put-and-take was a simple game, a child’s game. An ariel fluttered its fronds at her when she made a particularly skilled addition to the pile of stones, blocking the ariel’s progress. The fronds covered the ariel’s gill structures. Bishop had a similar set though his were larger and uglier. Ariadne reached up to absently rub behind Bishop’s jaw. He was already missing the rivers she could tell. She felt fortunate that she had been born in a time the star-folk were accepting travelers. Had Ariadne and Bishop been required to stay on the Cloud River, they would have been forced into a challenge within the next month or two and Ariadne was not eager for that. Better to seek new borders.

Arthur appeared in the opening to the cargo bay. “Are you settling in?” The sweep of his hand included Bishop and the ariels in his question. That moved him up in her estimation, most of the star-men she had encountered so far had difficulty remembering not to treat Bishop like a rock or a wild beast. Or how Ariadne imagined star-men treated wild beasts at least. On Gehenna there were just calibans, ariels, sea monsters, and fish.

“It’s like a big cave,” Ariadne said. “Bishop will get restless but for now, we’re content.”

He looked at the rocks and cushions she had spread across the floor. “What are you building?” He nodded to the game she was playing.

Ariadne shooed the ariel away and had Arthur take a seat opposite her. She gave the ariel a stone to show her continued good will. Ariels didn’t understand the concept of things yet to happen very well. “We have a pile of stones. You and I put one on without disturbing the pile. Then we take without disturbing the pile. First to make the pile fall loses.”

Fifteen minutes later, Arthur was almost as good at put-and-take as Taem the Younger, one of Ariadne’s brothers. “I started reading up on your planet when you were added to our itinerary. I didn’t get as far as I’d like.”

She started subtly angling her stones to shape the base of a dome. “What do you wish to know?”

“How to give you a good enough experience that you give your mother a good report,” Arthur flashed a smile at her. “The papers said your culture appreciates directness.”

Ariadne snorted. “Do you always stake so much on other people’s words?”

“Yes, daily,” Arthur said more soberly. “I do my best to verify what I can but I have to take the engineers’ word for it the ship is still spaceworthy. I can’t check the accuracy of all the navcharts by myself. Sooner or later, I have to sleep.”

Tossing and catching a stone one handed, Ariadne puzzled over that while Arthur made his move. “My sister, Dael, is most likely to inherit. Her brown, Flicker, would challenge anyone but Sun.”

“The Queen’s caliban?”

“The Queenmaker,” Ariadne corrected.

“What are the chances Sun would choose you?” Arthur asked.

“My connections with Green’s people aren’t strong enough,” she said almost immediately. “King Blue’s daughter might not inherit but I doubt she’ll be passed over in favor of me.”

Arthur accepted that information without cooling at all. “We’re going to the place your ancestors came from.”

“We have no allegiance to Union.” Ariadne answered one of his unspoken questions.

“Do you have anger for them?” Arthur asked.

“I would not be if they had not acted as they did,” Ariadne said reasonably. “But the things i have heard about them are not to my liking.”

“The azi.”

“Yes.”

***

The leg of the journey from Gehenna to Esperance was largely uneventful except for the engineering crew throwing Ariadne out on five different occasions as they hauled out to the jump point. That stopped when Cobb gave in and let Arthur give Ariadne a full tour of engineering. Grudgingly, the crew chief agreed to letting Ariadne watch at scheduled times.

Out of curiosity, he went down to the cargo bay where they were keeping their live cargo. He wasn’t surprised to hear voices coming from inside. Several crew members had reported on the Gehennan’s curiosity, some in more flattering terms than others. If nothing else, the young woman was unusual enough that most crew stopped by to gawk. What struck Cobb as strange was Ariadne’s laughter. She’d been very serious, with the self-conscious dignity of a young person given a tremendous responsibility each time he’d seen her.

“-but then we do act like someone’s mum half the time.” Cobb recognized Eames by his accent. “‘Are you playing nicely with the natives?’ ‘You won’t get any dessert if you keep pushing your neighbors around.’ ‘Now, now stop brainwashing you clones, it’s not nice.’” Eames said in a quavery falsetto.

Cobb cleared his throat for politeness before he reached the doorway. He saw Eames saluting with a computer by his feet, the usual array of rocks and cushions, a sleeping caliban, the skittering ariels, and Ariadne in her undyed homespun cloak and grey riding leathers. “Everything alright in here?”

Ariadne nodded. “Eames was just telling me about his home.”

Eames turned the computer off and tucked it under his arm. “I’ll be leaving.”

Cobb stood aside and watched Eames go. “Has he been bothering you?”

“No,” Ariadne shook her head. “He’s been good company.” She paused with an odd look. “ _He_ doesn’t think I’m a Union spy and he’s far from home too.”

He relaxed a little and leaned against the wall as Ariadne walked over to rub under her caliban’s jaw. “By the time humanity reached space, information on Earth was almost instantaneous.” He saw by the tilt of her eyebrows that he had her attention. “Earth never really adjusted to the idea that they’d sent people so far away that decisions were being made without them. Back when it was Tau Ceti, no one knew there was life on Downbelow. There were stations strung out along the cluster from Earth to Downbelow but no living worlds. We needed the living world. Food was taking too long to come from Earth and the price kept climbing. So the merchanters and stationers decided to use the planet. By the time news of the Downers got back to Earth, got through committee, and news got back to Downbelow, we were already there to stay.”

“You hoped Gehenna would be the same,” Ariadne said, her expression opaque.

“Downer culture is really interesting. The planet has few seasons and the Downers have almost no natural predators. They don’t strain the resources because their birth rate is so low. The women show that they’re interested and the men give pursuit. The one who maintains his pursuit the longest, wins. While she has a child to care for, she doesn’t begin a new chase.” Cobb lectured. “They’re not very aggressive because they have so little competition. They haven’t always been treated well by the Stationers but we try to trade, not take.”

“Try,” Ariadne said softly. “We tell stories about the fields that used to be. Our forebears worked them for the men and women behind the fence. Our forebears’ forebears had no choice, were made to do it. Our forebears could choose to work or live in the hills. The calibans let the ones in the hills live because they were guiltless.”

“What were the others guilty of?” Cobb asked because she seemed to be prompting him.

“Murdering calibans,” Ariadne said, stroking Bishop’s jaw.

“All of them?” Cobb asked to see how she responded.

“One man looks much like another to a caliban.” Ariadne said wryly. “And they disliked the pattern your people were building.”

“At one time there were people strongly in favor of siding with Jin over Elai,” Cobb prompted her.

“Jin’s people ate grey calibans,” Ariadne said. “You thought they were just animals.”

“I thought greys were barely sapient,” Cobb said, knowing the only other source of protein on Gehenna was fish. Ariels were not edible, the early colonists had tried. “You wear their skin.”

“This one died naturally,” Ariadne said, touching her leggings. “The calibans understand not letting things go to waste. They found a use for us.” The last was said with surprising fondness.

“Will they resist being part of the Alliance?” Cobb asked curiously.

“If the Alliance has something to offer and won’t try to make them be what they aren’t,” Ariadne said, “they’ll go along with the Alliance.”

Cobb flinched as he realized who Ariadne saw as being in charge. Even after having heard about the things the Dee family had done to the Downers, he had never quite pictured aliens having a similar view on humans. No, he had been afraid of aliens having that view of humans. What he had never pictured was humans who would see nothing wrong with it. “And if not?”

“Calibans are very good at disrupting patterns they don’t like,” Ariadne said softly.

***

Between Esperance and Cyteen, Helm sounded the alarm. “Prepare to repel boarders.”

Arthur rolled out of his bunk and was padding down the corridor to his power armor on pure reflex. He pulled on his armor from long practice and drill, automatically checking his readings. Helmet on, he headed for the airlock where the other men and women assigned to armor were also lining up and going through equipment checks. He took one last deep breath as the airlock cycled.

The star studded black swooped out at Arthur as he turned up so his magnetic boots would touch the outside of the crew ring. He walked calmly with adrenalin thrumming through him to his tether point, the ring still turning to provide gravity to the inside. “Secure!” he called over their comm channel as soon as his tether was fastened. He counted off the others as they signed in their positions. He could feel the hungry dark waiting for a mistake, any mistake. “Vector?” he called in on the command frequency.

Orienting himself along the painting on the keel, Arthur turned to watch the direction the bridge indicated. He saw lines of fire streaking from one of the smaller merchanter vessels and immediately clicked open a line to the comm center. “Tell those assholes on the _Blue Elephant_ to stop wasting their fucking ammo.” He ground his teeth as he watched the rounds sail off into the dark, beyond feasible recovery.

Magnifying the image on the vector the battle frequency named, Arthur could see the pirates. Cobb, from the bridge, was ordering the merchanters into formation. From long practice, Arthur narrowed his focus down to what he and the others on the keel needed to do.

***

Eames manned a scan console as the battle progressed. Cobb’s control of the battle was never disputed and Eames was almost surprised by how quickly the pirates gave up. The woman interpreting the readout next to Eames’s said that Cobb’s experience during the Company Wars had served them well on their last three tours. Polite inquiries gained him information about the habits of pirates and the personal tidbit that Cobb had been impressed before Earth Company had tried to dissolve the fleet.

The wide eyed ensign was full of stories about her Captain and how he had learned from the great Signy Mallory about flushing out pirates and raiding their navcomps for the coordinates they used. Eames took it all with a grain of salt. She could be trying to pull something over on him, assuming a man from Earth would believe anything but her hero worship appeared genuine. It was the first spontaneous conversation he’d had since the card playing incident so Eames thought he might as well act interested.

After they all stood down and were back on their way to the jump point, Eames went to the head. Arthur walked in after Eames and cleared his throat. Eames turned an interested look on Arthur, feeling himself fading back to a voice in the back of his head as he saw how big Arthur’s pupils were and the slight tremor in Arthur’s hands. The sweat circles under Arthur’s arms were a reminder that he’d just been outside. “Off duty?”

“Yes,” Arthur turned a grey water tap and splashed water on his face.

Eames felt himself smile as he leaned against the bulkhead and put his hands behind his back. “Cobb is a legend among the crew.”

“Impressed from a merchanter family, served under Captain Mallory, hero of the Alliance of Pell. I wouldn’t be alive if the _Norway_ hadn’t evaced my parents from the front.” Arthur said. “Most celebrated traitor of our age.” His smile was brief and brilliant.

Eames rocked up on his toes, rubbing his fingers together. The part of him observing noted that Arthur’s smile didn’t fade naturally, it vanished like a light shutting off. “I thought she was considered a hero out here.”

“She is,” Arthur said, stepping closer to Eames. “Without her defection, Downbelow would either have been overrun by Union or taken over by Admiral Mazian. Who knows which would have been worse?” He shrugged. “It was a betrayal though.”

“Have a thing for traitors, hmm?” Eames asked before kissing Arthur. He took in the details of the way Arthur’s eyes widened, the way his hands found Eames’s arms and his fingers tightened. “I won’t tell. I’m not the snitch from Earth.”

Later, Eames would examine every minute detail. He would see the moment his words sank in. Before he could process anything, Arthur was out of the head and down the corridor. The observant portion of him would have called Arthur’s reaction a flinch. It still wasn’t a lie when Ariadne asked about the new tension between him and Arthur and he said, “I don’t know.”

***

Cyteen Station hung in orbit around Cyteen. “Each continent has a completely separate ecology with no overlap.” Cobb told Ariadne, pointing at the display. “They were in the process of terraforming the southern continent when they discovered the way to make the rejuv drugs. Now there’s a massive conservation effort.” He gave Ariadne a stern look. “When we go down, don’t go outside the marked areas. They have static fields up to knock down the plant matter. Outside the fields, it’ll get stuck in your lungs and turn them cancerous. It’s still a major cause of death on Cyteen. All their buildings are set up so they can travel underground on windy days.”

Cobb’s mind was already running forward, preparing for disembarkation. Mal AMX-528 would be there and that... He looked down at Ariadne. “We’ll be exiting to the station soon. This Union space and Union laws apply.”

“I need to go translate to Bishop so he understands,” Ariadne said and slipped away.

“Mal wants a wide range of test subjects. They’re at human trials.” Cobb told Arthur as soon as it was the two of them.

“Are you sure?” Arthur asked uneasily.

“They may have different rules about human testing but they want results,” Cobb said. When Arthur didn’t stop frowning he sighed. “So far they’ve gone through dozens of trials with azi that have been pulled off perfectly. Mal wants to see what it’s like on born-men.”

“I’ll tell Ariadne the risks.” Arthur said quietly, tight lipped.

“And Eames,” Cobb said.

“What?” Arthur’s head snapped up.

“She wants to study the symbolism from a variety of cultural backgrounds.” Cobb said, tallying up the range of physical ages he’d be bringing along. The Saito and Takahashi families would each be sending people along for the relatively cheap price of getting some of the drug to sell on the blackmarket. Cobb assumed Mal or the Special she was working with would mark it destroyed.

“I’ll let him know,” Arthur said stiffly.

“Have they made shipping arrangements?” Cobb asked, already thinking ahead to working with Mal again.

“Yes,” Arthur said crisply. “I’ll go take care of the details.”  



	2. Part II

“Sorry for the delay,” Yusuf said, shading his eyes as the group disembarked. “The Abolitionists were acting up and the delay pushed your flight over into a wind warning.” He made eye contact with Cobb and said, “Mal had to go back to the lab.”

Cobb nodded and introduced the rest of the party. Cobb preferred to travel with the same few crew when Yusuf saw him. Or maybe it was Arthur who selected the party members. Yusuf wasn’t sure what kind of delegation happened between them but it involved long periods of silence punctuated by sharp bouts of yelling. They normally met on Cyteen Station rather than the planet itself because waiting for a good time to land could be days and rumors would leak if an Alliance convoy went too far off schedule too often for her lead Captain to explain. 

The reason they could afford to meet in Reseune’s groundside facilities poked his nose out of the shuttle and fixed Yusuf with a reptilian eye. Yusuf could tell the exact moment his hindbrain registered the caliban. He was rooted to the spot with a sudden dread of the vast lizard. Not for the first time, he wondered how humans had managed to survive regular contact with the calibans. They were ugly. And huge. And so far from anything human.

Yusuf tore his eyes back to Cobb and realized the other man had paused impatiently and he had missed the beginning of the introductions. “That’s Bishop,” Cobb said when Yusuf gave his whole attention to the conversation. “Ariadne is Bishop’s interpreter. Eames is a new crewmember from Earth.”

Nodding to Saito, Yusuf guided them toward Reseune’s facilities. Not the main ones of course. Too much of what they were doing needed to be kept out of the Volga and far enough away that even if all the containment procedures failed, nothing would live. “The agricultural wing has grown since the last time you were here.” There were polite nods and grunts from most of the spacers.

“Farming,” Arthur said audibly to Ariadne. It was hard to tell but Yusuf thought the woman might have brightened at that.

“I can arrange for a tour,” Yusuf said, remembering his instructions to make a good impression on the Gehennans.

“Do you use azi?” Ariadne asked.

Laughing too hard to speak, Yusuf had to stop. “My apologies. Yes. We employ azi.” He recognized the shaking in his hands as let down from his adrenal response to the caliban.

“Why is that funny?” Ariadne asked. 

“Reseune owns all unemancipated azi.” Arthur said neutrally. “It’s been a long term political struggle to keep it that way.”

“Can you imagine it would be better for them if the military owned them?” Yusuf asked her when he saw the corners of her mouth tuck down.

“We have stories-”

“Gehenna was a military project.” Yusuf said quickly without so much as a twinge of guilt at passing the responsibility on. “They wanted to get ahead of the Alliance, make the planet unusable, but didn’t have the resources to defend it. Born men were thrown at that planet too. You’re probably descended from them as well.” He cleared his throat. “It was a big scandal when the news broke. The Military Bureau’s heroes-”

“The heroes were thrown in the mud and progress marches on.” Eames said from the back of the group with a cynical smile. “Science Bureau made out well and Reseune is the dominant force in the Science Bureau.” He turned to Arthur. “See? I did read that briefing you gave me.”

Yusuf looked at Arthur and decided to postpone a continuation of that intercultural dialogue. “You’ll be quartered in the south wing. We’ve cleared out a warehouse for the cal- Bishop. Mal will want to talk to all of you.”

***

The chiming of her workstation pulled Mal AMX-528 back from the contemplation of the section of code she was editing. She pulled the notification up on her screen and began hurriedly pulling her belongings together to greet her new test subjects and Cobb. It had been awhile since she had seen Cobb. Trying to add the days in her head, she checked her hair in the mirror and straightened her civilian clothes. For once, she would meet him wearing something other than black.

Taking the left down to the bottom of the building, Mal remembered to check her hair. Still wondering what she was forgetting and bits of code flashing across her inner eye, she palmed the lock on the south wing and put on her best smile. She barely noticed anyone but Cobb and then Arthur before she began telling them and the merchanters about her progress.

“The trials have been very successful. We think we’ve stabilized the drug’s reactions but the process is so determined by neurochemical responses that we need to test beyond azi.” She nodded to Yusuf.

“What about side effects?” Saito asked her. 

“Minimal. For azi.” Mal shrugged. “But we already take code into our subconscious and the process is not so different from dreaming. We cannot predict the impact on a less ordered mind. Fewer than kat, we suspect. Certainly nothing lethal without an anaphylactic response but that is a danger with any drug.”

“And you anticipate that this will enhance learning?” the young Takahashi asked.

“Dreaming enhances connections, helps the brain encode memories. This drug actually enables shared dreaming. Instead of trying to find the right words, the right set of diagrams, the dreamer can show others exactly what he or she means. The shared dream happens at a slower rate, roughly five minutes of real time to an hour of dream time. Imagine being able to get an entire staff to share the same dream for an hour. Imagine the impact on collaboration.” Mal said enthusiastically.

“The recreational purposes hardly need to be expanded on.” Yusuf put in quietly.

“I’ll go first,” Arthur said, with a slight look to Cobb and Saito. When neither disagreed, he nodded more firmly. 

***

Ariadne watched curiously. Arthur didn’t even move, just lay there with the line running out of his arm. She had been expecting something like when one of the crewmen took tape. The dreaded machines that made her ancestors so pliant had a very different effect on the crew of the _Proclus_. The only response the star-men gave her when she expressed her concerns was indifference. Life was too short to learn everything by doing, they said. Once, Arthur had demonstrated for her how he swallowed a pill, chose a tape, and then relaxed and let the information flow across his nervous system. Ariadne didn’t trust it but everyone seemed so at ease with the idea, without even a breath to suggest they were trying to trick her, that she was beginning to see it as one of those places she must look in order to gather more information.

“That was-” Arthur shook his head as he sat up.

“Incredible, no?” Yusuf said.

“How long should a user wait to try again?” Arthur asked, carefully removing the line from his arm.

“Obviously normal sleep is still necessary but we haven’t found a limit other than that,” Mal answered, cleaning up the area.

Saito stepped forward with intent. “Will one of you go under with me?”

“As a Special, I can’t and as an Alpha, Mal can’t.” Yusuf said quickly enough that Ariadne suspected both Yusuf and Mal had broken that rule.

“I will,” Ariadne heard herself say.

***

Saito looked up forever into a bright blue sky. Outward as far as he could see there was a dusty road winding through terrace after terrace of grain and short, twisted trees. A salt wind blew from the direction of the lowering sun, bringing the smell of fruit. He turned and saw Ariadne at his elbow. “Your home, I presume?”

“There’s the tower,” Ariadne pointed to a distant hump on the horizon. She started walking toward the road. In an eyeblink, they were in a tunnel and he could hear something dragging against stone in the distance. She took his hand in the dark and led him into an open cavern. Sunlight fell through a hole to one end, lighting dust motes. “Just like when I was a child. Bishop and I used to come here to get away from Red.”

“In the dark?” Saito had never been in a completely dark place before. There were always emergency lights or regular lights just a voice command away. On a spaceship or a station, being able to get to the controls and read them was a matter of life and death.

“We all come down here. One of my first memories is from here.” Ariadne said even as the air flickered around them. A river flowed wide and lazy away from the rising sun. A large brown caliban slid into the river with a silvery splash. A smaller grey reared its head in another spray of water, eyeing them from the water. It seemed to focus on them as it hauled itself onto the shore and water began spewing out of its mouth.

Still dripping, the grey moved their direction. Ariadne pulled on Saito’s arm. The lizard’s mouth opened wide and as Saito turned away, he saw another brown gaining on them. 

He awoke, holding his arm where it had been torn from its socket. “You didn’t mention the pain.”

“Pain is in the mind,” Mal said quietly. “Are your dreams always peaceful?”

“Typically we get that reaction when the psychsets vary by a factor more than five,” Yusuf said, obviously choosing the wording for his notes. “Which most people do to one degree or another. Would you mind taking a survey I’ve been drafting? Recording your experiences?”

“Within limits,” Saito said cautiously.

Yusuf shrugged cheerfully. “No one but azi ever answer with complete honesty.”

“And even then we need to be wary of pressuring for the answers we desire,” Mal said. 

“If we could take blood samples...” Yusuf seemed to remember himself and looked around the room. “For hormonal reactions, not for the drug. Chemistry never lies. Though it may be occasionally misleading.”

“We’ll see what we can arrange,” Cobb said quickly.

***

“You cannot continue to treat this as a hostile interrogation,” Mal told Eames over the edge of her comp screen. “This is worthless. Thirty minutes and none of these answers is worth a thing.”

Smiling, Eames winked at her. “You’re not on my side, are you?”

“I’m impartial,” Mal said and tapped her keyboard.

“No such thing,” Eames said, relaxing back into his chair and focusing on the feeling of letting his hands go loose.

“True, but my interest is in how the drug affects-” She tapped a few more keys. “Oh. Very well. We will continue to meet for the usual times so no one wonders why you’re getting special treatment?”

A spike of ice seemed to have stabbed Eames in the gut as he looked into Mal’s green eyes met his. “Special treatment?” he asked in a voice that sounded level and friendly.

“You’re not likely to open up to me at all and less so if I push you,” Mal’s eyes narrowed in thought. “You’ll do your debriefs with Yusuf.” She pushed on as if Eames might object and Eames realized his throat was already tightening into an answer. “As a Special, he can be questioned but not interrogated. Can’t risk damaging him or his work. Anything he chooses to share will be a choice.”

“Not like you,” Eames said, tilting his head down so he was looking up at her.

“I share everything with my Supervisor,” Mal said with a smile. “Go on. No use talking more today.”

Eames left the office with a smile, knowing it had an edge he needed to get rid of before he saw someone he knew. He stopped to adjust his clothes into the sloppy, colorful arrangement common among the non-azi populace of Reseune. An azi in neat blacks walked past Eames, avoiding him with her eyes. The skin on the back of Eames’s neck prickled as he watched her walk away. The azi were so quiet. No personality. Nothing that couldn’t be reset with a visit to his or her Supervisor and the right right set of tapes.

He went to one of the covered courtyards and watched people come and go in the shops. He saw a neat black-clad azi stand neutrally waiting while a dark haired woman in equally neat slacks and bright blouse ordered sandwiches. Another azi stood watching the angles the first couldn’t see, her blacks nearly identical to her companion’s. Eames took in the imperious tilt of the woman’s head, the lift of her hand as she placed her order.

“You’re in the wrong place,” a muscular azi said, looming over Eames.

“Sorry,” Eames said, holding up his hands and beating a hasty retreat.

“Class A badges only,” the azi said quietly.

***

Ariadne stepped over the threshold into a brightly lit corridor filled with light and color. Cobb stood at her side, escorting her. She paused in front of a piece of cloth covered in unusually shaded dyes. 

“A painting from Earth. Pre-space flight I think. Arthur would know better than I would.” Cobb inspected the painting closely.

“Very expensive,” Ariadne guessed.

“Enough to buy Saito’s _Radical Notion_ twice over.” Cobb said.

“Some might find such a display of wealth vulgar. A statement of power that I can keep a treasure in such an out of the way corner.” A dark haired woman flanked by a man and woman in black. The blond woman was taller than her dark haired partner and both moved with a kind of muscular control Ariadne hadn’t seen in any star-man she’d met before. They both had the look of Riders waiting for a cue from their calibans, a sense of being perfectly attuned to the woman and each other.

“Councillor Emory,” Cobb nodded to the woman.

Ariane Emory II smiled at them and somehow it was all sharp edges and corners. “I like this one but it clashes with all the decor in the Novgorod facility. So, you are Ariadne.” Emory’s dark eyes looked Ariadne up and down.

For the first time in weeks, Ariadne felt like she was back at home. The way Councillor Emory looked at her reminded Ariadne strongly of her mother. She responded as she did when her mother took an interest. Ariadne tilted her head so her throat was a little exposed and made steady eye contact with the Councillor. “Yes, ma’am.”

“How are your hosts treating you?” Emory asked, shooting Cobb a look. 

“I’m learning a great deal, ma’am,” Ariadne said politely.

“How much is what they want you to learn?” Emory asked, gesturing them into a set of similarly lit rooms.

“Some,” Ariadne allowed herself to be moved onto a chair with Emory situated between herself and Cobb. She crossed her legs and folded her hands like Emory as she watched the two security personnel station themselves by the door. “Are you going to introduce them?”

“Catlin and Florian have been with me since the beginning.” Emory gestured to the woman and then the man. “My predecessor had hers destroyed on her death.”

Ariadne knew Emory was trying to provoke her. It was working so she said nothing.

“It was a kindness, really. Without her protection, they would have been at the mercy of her political enemies within Reseune. Azi are vulnerable in so many ways that we are not.”

“Then why make them?” Ariadne burst out and realized it was exactly the question Ariane had wanted her to ask. She looked to Cobb for his reaction but he was frowning at something internal. Something to do with Mal if she needed to guess.

“Originally? Birth rates.” Emory answered, sparking a memory of Cobb telling Ariadne about the Downers. “A population with low birth rates has difficulty holding territory. Many of the original colonists had specialties that required much of their attention. Raising children is time and energy consuming.” Again, Ariadne was reminded of her mother and the electric chill her mother’s attention could bring. “So, my predecessor’s maman and _her_ colleagues took some shortcuts.”

Ariadne frowned at her hands. “You make people to be thrown away.”

“Every culture does.” Emory waved an elegant hand. “We’re just more honest about it than others. Ask your Alliance friends what happens to their criminals. The ones who get caught that is. The azi are mine and I take care of them. What happened on Gehenna...” Ariadne was certain Emory’s pause was for effect but had the lingering feeling that the flicker of anger she’d seen was real and not directed at anyone in the room. “What happened on Gehenna is what always happens when someone misunderstands a potent tool. If my predecessor could have prevented it, she would have. What was done was cruel and earned us only more potential enemies.” Emory paused and didn’t try to hide her calculation from Ariadne. “I promise not to touch you. If you need an assurance, if I were to work on you, it would skew any data we collected from you after that point in whatever projects you might or might not be part of.”

“I feel like I can take it from here,” Ariadne said, turning to look at Cobb.

“Don’t trust her,” Cobb said urgently.

“I don’t,” Ariadne said calmly.

“You were compromised before you landed,” Emory told Cobb in a tone that suggested a reminder.

Ariadne realized that Cobb hadn’t refuted Emory’s suggestions about how Alliance treated its criminals. “Please leave,” she said firmly.

Cobb gave her three more backward glances before leaving the suite. Ariadne had no doubt Arthur would be his first stop and Mal his second. When the door was shut, Ariadne forced herself to relax again. “What am I to you?”

“Oh, very good. You think I might be more willing to let you control the conversation without him present. And you say ‘what,’ not ‘who’ telling me you know the question you want to ask. I have no doubt that had you been raised in Union, you’d have earned yourself a Special license. I’ve seen the scores from your station tests.” Emory’s smile turned engaging. “How about a deal; question for question? Nothing either of us would see as a betrayal of our side.”

“I can back out when I want to,” Ariadne said, tilting her chin up. It was mostly for appearances’ sake. This was exactly the sort of opportunity she’d been sent to the stars to find. If she handled this well enough she might even find something to justify her position in the tower.

“Of course,” Emory said, crossing her legs the other direction. “What you are is a result from an experiment I would never have allowed to run. But once something is in motion, knowledge is knowledge. I would very much like to understand what happened on Gehenna. It could be that understanding Gehenna’s growth could benefit all of humanity.”

Ariadne allowed herself a moment to pick through the bits that might just be flattery and the bits that might be true solely from Emory’s perspective. “And your question?”

“Why has Alliance allowed you to come here?” Emory asked. “In your words, not those you were given.”

“Cobb wants to continue his business here as smoothly as possible and I have been told the greater government made an agreement.” Ariadne said. “My mother and the King would like to evaluate their options fully.”

“What do you have to offer?” Emory asked, sitting forward. “Us and the Alliance?”

“Why are you so afraid of us?” Ariadne shot back.

“You’re an unknown. I couldn’t predict you. Justin comes close most of the time but past the fourth generation, I couldn’t see what you’d become.” Emory’s tone suggested approval. “Now, what do you have to offer?”

“Connections,” Ariadne said, mind ranging forward to find her next question. “We live with builders. We see where to brace and where to let stand.”

“And where to simply start over,” Emory said with more grimness. “My predecessor ordered my creation because she knew she would die with too many questions left unanswered. Some have called it egotism but the truth is that there is no one else like me. My predecessor had me created because I was and am necessary.” Her tone turned dangerous. “I feel no pity for your ancestors and I feel no pity for you. There are so few worlds where humans can go and stand under the sky unprotected and they _wasted_ one simply so that Alliance couldn’t have it. That kind of pettiness can kill us all.”

“You are trying to make me waste a question,” Ariadne said, weighing her options. “The obvious question is ‘what do you mean’ but you don’t expect me to ask that because it’s obvious. So, i ask you: What is the difference between you and _them_?” Ariadne nodded her head toward the azi standing by the door.

For a third time, Ariadne was reminded of her mother. This time there was a similarity in the way Emory expressed just a flash of approval. Just enough to let Ariadne know she had done well and enough to entice her to earn another flash. “Biologically, there is little difference between myself and them. The real difference is experience. I could tell you what it makes to build an azi but it all comes down to experience. We come from the same birth lab but I was given randomized experiences and they were given regimented ones. They are just as smart as I am, just as capable, but they do not see the solutions I do or you do because their experiences have taught them to look for different things. Most azi are not as smart as we are.” Ariadne realized that it was clever of Emory to make a group containing both them and the azi. An intriguing way of turning those not in the room into a They, and placing herself within a boundary with Ariadne.

“Most of your ancestors were designed to work the fields,” Emory continued. “They would have been happy to do so and the food would have been needed. Preliminary surveys said that the none of the native life had human-level intelligence. Those were mistaken, obviously. If they had found the calibans to be intelligent, they would most likely have appealed to Earth to take a moral stand. It would have been cheaper than planting a colony and less of a future time bomb.”

“They failed your tests and you failed theirs.” Ariadne said. “That’s why the colony failed.”

“Possibly in part.” Emory said. “The colonists were told they were the first wave. They were waiting for us to send them more supplies and personnel. That kind of waiting would have ruined the colony regardless. Eventually the authority of the leaders would be eroded. Especially among the children of the azi. Azi can only be created with birth labs, which the colony was absolutely never going to be trusted with, whatever promises were made to them.The only certainty in that equation was that the work force would rebel. After the azi passed from living memory, it was impossible to predict the shape of how Gehenna civilization would grow.” Emory held Ariadne’s gaze and Ariadne held her breath. “Living memory because gamma class azi are almost always illiterate and the ones sent to Gehenna definitely were. Azi learn best from tapes, reading is a waste of their time.”

“According to our history, the calibans killed the leader of the colony in the first year. They say because we were going to blow ourselves out like a storm.” Ariadne said. “What do you feel guilty for?”

“There are many things that people have told me I should feel guilty for. Most of them have to do with my predecessor’s actions. I was worked on to replace her not just in power but in talents. It worked better than our enemies would have liked but I don’t have her memories, only her files. She was smart the way I am smart so she wouldn’t hide anything big from me deliberately but we all have blind spots.” Ariadne was struck with the realization that Emory was mimicking her speech patterns. Star-men had ways of watching people when they weren’t nearby. There was no way to know how much time Emory had spent studying her. “I feel no pity for them and no guilt over what happened because I was not there. It would be a cheating answer to stop there. I am uneasy and would like to ask you a question that doesn’t count. Do you know what a worm is?”

She shook her head warily as the tension in the room rocketed upward into levels Ariadne only experienced when Bishop got restless. She wasn’t sure how much to trust Emory’s version of events but it was all leading up to this moment. “A mythical animal. The calibans resemble them.”

“There is an urban legend in Novgorod. Like most urban legends it has several forms and relies heavily on conspiracies and hearsay. If there was ever proof such a thing was possible, there would be mass panic. What it is, in its most basic form, is a contagious idea. The legend says that this company or that one has planted a worm in its tapes. An idea to make people do certain things or to wait for some triggering event.” Emory said very carefully.

“I’m not going to ask,” Ariadne said stoically.

“I do not know how possible it is in non-azi but with azi it is... very easy. My predecessor planted a worm in the azi she gave to the Gehenna project. An idea to proliferate and spread itself and mutate. In its more complex form its a collection of imperatives to respect the larger world and community and pass that information on. At its simplest, it directed them ‘teach your children what you know.’ I doubt you would be alive if she hadn’t. The azi sent along were trained for management and agriculture. None of them had even the tiniest experience with child rearing much less a child as tempestuous as non-azi children are. Azi children are obedient and docile-”

Ariadne held up a hand. “Why tell me?”

“This is why we’ve been so desperate to establish contact. We need to know how it worked. And you need to understand how dangerous this information is. If people suspected that Reseune could do that, it would be bad for us. If they suspected that your people came from that kind of meddling, they might panic too. Your calibans protect you from a lot but if the Alliance decided you were sleepers for us they could pelt Gehenna with space debris. People would get seriously hurt. It might tip things back into all-out war and I don’t know if humanity could survive that.”

“What’s your question for me?” Ariadne asked, giving no reaction.

“Your name is unusual. How did you get it?” Emory asked, relaxing back into her chair.

“It was a wish my mother made for me,” Ariadne said. “A star-man told her a story about a girl who could find her way through a maze with a monster. It’s what my mother wanted for me.”

***

Arthur slammed the filing cabinet shut and stalked over to the window. Outside there was water falling up in droplets. The flashlight in his pocket was dead and he was sure he could hear something scuttling in the walls. Moving a table in front of the door, Arthur held the papers up to the watery light.

Most of the pages were irrelevant; a docking manifest for a ship that had visited Mars years ago, a security rotation roster, a shopping list for a print shop, etc. Arthur could see the connection between a port known to leak luxury goods onto the black market and materials for running a con. It was interesting then, that he found the information he was looking for associated with such old information. He carefully examined the page and drew his sidearm. His hands trembled as he put the weapon to his head. He gritted his teeth and felt sweat trickle down his spine.

The scurrying, rustling grew louder and there were footsteps pounding in the corridor outside. He took a deep breath and almost pulled the trigger. The shadows lengthened and grew, reaching for Arthur. Someone screamed in the distance as Arthur bit down on his lip and pulled the trigger.

He jerked upright, gasping for air and surprised to be alive. Arthur nearly gagged before stuttering the coordinates he’d found.

“What sort of traps did Eames set up?” Yusuf asked with interest.

“There was something in the walls, bad lighting, somebody screaming, and I think maybe someone at the door. Some sort of acid in the safe.” He turned as he saw Eames slowly rousing from the drug’s influence. “I went in over the roof. Part of it caved in.”

“Why didn’t you die or fall then?” Yusuf asked, tapping at his computer.

Arthur shrugged. “I had my gear,” he said with full confidence.

“Too many old tapes,” Yusuf muttered.

***

Eames slid into Arthur’s subconscious. It took the form of a brightly lit corridor stretching out in both directions. There was an eerie, warped feeling to the space. The doors looked the same distance apart up close but that changed and bent as he looked into the distance. Walking up to one metal door, he studied the lock before picking it. Inside, he found a simple room with two cots, a vidscreen, and a couch covered in work clothes. 

Snorting, Eames sank to his knees and shoved his hand under the couch cushions. He found a few entertainment parlor tokens and a ticket stub to a ball game. He looked down at his find before sitting on the couch facing the vidscreen. Scrunching down to a child’s height, Eames followed the line of sight to a panel behind the vidscreen.

“Can I help you?” a woman’s voice came from the bathroom. She had familiar brown eyes, fair skin, and Arthur’s nose.

“I’m one of Arthur’s friends from school,” Eames said smoothly. “I was supposed to help him with his homework but he forgot it.”

“Oh,” she frowned vaguely at him. “Are you sure?”

“Math,” Eames said firmly.

“I think he left it over here,” the woman started going through a stack of paper Eames was fairly certain hadn’t been there a moment before. “Ah, here.”

Eames took the paper and read the coordinates. He gave her a charming smile and his thanks before exiting back out of the tiny apartment. Since that had happened so fast, he decided it was time to do some exploring. He didn’t notice that as he left the room his reflection was that of a child.

Wandering out the door, Eames found himself in a hydroponics garden filled with plants he didn’t recognize. As he shoved through the vines, they shifted and became pipes and hoses. There was an ominous groan from deep in the twisted metal heart of the machinery. Eames gave a quick look around and decided that sort of warning would be near something valuable. The temperature dropped steadily as he followed the loudest pipe. As he walked, he thought of Arthur.

He stopped by an odd filing cabinet to rifle through the papers. Most of it was junk; old report cards, an in-system vector years out of date, a snippet of a report on Tripoint, or a requisition form for spare parts. Buried at the bottom of the stack though, was a medical intake form on one Rebekah Davison. Frowning, Eames tried to imagine how Arthur would have reacted. Adjustment. It was not a halfway solution for anything.

Eames was struck with the memory of kissing Arthur. No matter how often he thought about it, he was sure that Arthur had been kissing him back before he left. Two questions kept cycling through Eames’s thoughts: What had happened to break it off? What would Eames have to do to get back to that point?

Occasionally, Eames also wondered if Arthur was cooking up some sort of revenge but so far there was no trace that Arthur had any such plans. If anything, Arthur had been even more polite than usual. Arthur had been spending a lot of time with Ariadne. Maybe Arthur would prefer-

“What are you doing here?” Arthur frowned at Eames from a doorway. “Did Mal send you down too?”

“What?” Eames said intelligently.

Arthur’s expression hardened. “Eames.”

“Who else?” Eames asked. He watched Arthur’s face as he felt his way around an answer. The interruption was more abrupt than any Eames had seen so far. A loud bang shook the floor under his feet, swiftly followed by a klaxon he could feel in his ear drums. There was a shriek of wind and the loss of gravity pulled him out of the dream. “Who else?” he asked more intensely.

“Ariadne. You looked like Ariadne.” Arthur stared hard at Eames.

Eames grunted and shifted his attention to Yusuf. He gave the information he’d been assigned to find and told Yusuf about the hull breach ending of the dream.

“Wait, you found it? What were you doing still wandering around then?” Arthur’s eyes narrowed.

“I found it quite easily, darling.” Eames shot back. “Your mum gave it to me.”

Arthur had already been pale but he went white as a sheet at that.

“You talked to one of the people in the dream?” Yusuf asked, leaking excitement out of every pore. “And it worked?”

“I told her I was helping Arthur with his homework. She was suspicious but-” Eames shrugged. “She didn’t attack me the way Cobb’s version of Scan 3 did.”

“Behaving according to the dream’s context may yield-” Yusuf began mumbling into his wrist recorder.

“You pretended to be my friend to my mother?” Arthur eyed Eames.

“She’s not your mother. She’s part of you, isn’t she? Part of _your_ bloody dream.”

Arthur opened his mouth and was interrupted by Yusuf, “I’d like to the two of you to attempt a retrieval from Cobb. Together. Your stress scores when you’re under together are amazing. You fight for control of the dream, of course, but your shared dreams are some of the most stable so far. Ariadne has quite a talent for it too.” 

Arthur nodded curtly, swabbing his arm with disinfectant. 

Eames swallowed, his throat dry. “I will if he will.”

“I’m especially interested in seeing if you can duplicate that trick where you appeared to Arthur as Ariadne.” Yusuf said cheerfully. “None of the other subjects have done anything close.”

***

Arthur fired off his gun in controlled bursts at the large lizard that bore down on him and Eames. “We need to get to the tower.”

“I don’t see it,” Eames lobbed a grenade he’d pulled from somewhere Arthur couldn’t see. 

“Ariadne showed me before. It’s there.” Arthur pointed.

“That? That’s not a tower, Arthur. That’s a hill.” Eames said, taking a moment to glare at Arthur.

Arthur shrugged. “The entire community lives inside it. It sticks out of the ground.”

Muttering about colonials, Eames followed Arthur through sparse grass and stunted fruit trees. “Hold on,” Eames said and paused. “So I look different?”

“No,” Arthur said, scanning the horizon for more bits of Ariadne’s memory and self.

“Still upset about me talking to your mum?” Eames said and Arthur could hear a smile in his voice.

Arthur glared at Eames and said nothing. Behind Eames, for a moment, another person flashed into being and was gone. Arthur’s mother in the whites she wore after her Adjustment, wearing the childishly trusting expression she’d worn the last time she’d seen him and reaching for him... Doors slammed in Arthur’s mind.

“Alright,” the corners of Eames’s mouth turned down. “How about now?”

Focusing on Eames, Arthur shook his head. “We need to bring a mirror next time.”

“Oh, that’s easy enough.” Eames pulled a mirror out of a pocket.

“How do you do that?” Arthur asked.

“There’s no reason it shouldn’t be there,” Eames said.

Arthur grunted. “They’re getting restless. They get me, we’re out.”

“No pressure,” Eames said sarcastically in Cobb’s voice.

Looking down, Arthur still saw Eames crouched in the roots of a tree. “Closer.”

Eames glared at Arthur and took a deep breath. Looking back into the mirror, Eames frowned and glared at his reflection. 

Arthur paused as he saw a grey caliban crest a rise. He brought his weapon up to sight at the lizard, waiting for his moment. An outburst from Eames and the flicker of something shiny ruined his concentration.

Another few seconds of real-time later, Arthur was rubbing his knee where he’d felt caliban fangs sink in right before the caliban had snapped his neck by shaking him. He glared at Eames.

“I need to practice. Out here.” Eames said, bouncing up with no sign of how he’d been injured. “Or in my own head.

“Ariadne was tasked with a Keep Away?” Arthur asked, studiously ignoring Eames. “Isn’t that jumping the gun? Where’s the control run?”

“I thought we might find out more if you were expecting it,” Mal said calmly, reading a blood test. “And I was correct. Your brain scans were very different from azi.”

Arthur noticed that Eames’s expression cooled noticeably when he saw Mal. He walked between Eames and Mal to look at the scan. From the corner of his eye, he saw Eames relax almost invisibly. “What’s next?”

“Well, let’s see,” Mal tapped a few buttons on the computer before smiling at them. “I think you’ll like this one.”


End file.
